It's not however doing quite what I'd like it to, but what I'd like it to do is more a cross of example 3 and 2. On the website I'm designing, I have a "featured" block, followed by 4 "recent articles"

I was wondering if there was a way of displaying an 'announcement' (The top most topic) in the featured block, and then the rest of the 'news' forum in the recent article's block. The way I've got it split at the moment is basically, in the template file: